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Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

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Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#481

Post by newzisforsukas »

Vespasian wrote: post #360
WheatMillington wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how bundling Teams has pushed competitors out of the market. If anything it should make competitors more appealing, as they don't require the bundled MS software?

Everybody needs Office. There really is no practical way around it for businesses Now companies get a "free" (initially) software in addition to what they actually want. Microsoft can only afford that because they already get Money from their Monopoly product and can finance it that way without the customers having the ability to object (because Office has a market domineering position). Business chat competitors can…

> There really is no practical way around it for businesses

No one I work with uses Office. I work for a business.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#482

Post by FreakLegion »

OJFord wrote: post #451
lolinder wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?

I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'. This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/

That sounds about right. I routinely dig through cybersecurity data from around 100k companies, and Microsoft has no real competition. Occasionally I see Google at a little 500-person up-and-comer, but almost never in the enterprise, and they show up less and less as the companies get bigger. I don't think I've ever seen them in the Fortune 100, for example, other than at Google itself. The world runs on Exchange and Office.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#483

Post by neerajsi »

Vespasian wrote: post #360
WheatMillington wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how bundling Teams has pushed competitors out of the market. If anything it should make competitors more appealing, as they don't require the bundled MS software?

Everybody needs Office. There really is no practical way around it for businesses Now companies get a "free" (initially) software in addition to what they actually want. Microsoft can only afford that because they already get Money from their Monopoly product and can finance it that way without the customers having the ability to object (because Office has a market domineering position). Business chat competitors can…

I'd argue that Office has competition in the form of GSuite, which has collaborative features

So how much market share does Office have to lose to GSuite before Microsoft can implement features that their competitor has?

Put another way, does a dominant market player have to stagnate in order to avoid breaking antitrust law, rather than anticipating the needs of their customers to make their product more useful?

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#484

Post by elevatedastalt »

thinkindie wrote: post #123
rufius wrote: post #108

I’m curious what materially changed beyond Slack complaining. Microsoft has long bundled Lync/Skype-for-Business with Office 365. Hell it did that, I’m pretty sure, before Slack even existed.

skype for business didn't really take off as much as team now. Team spread like a cancer like nothing else before.

So if they had bundled a shitty software that would have been more OK than then bundling a software that people want to use more?

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#485

Post by elevatedastalt »

antihero wrote: post #388
tombert wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a few interviews that use Teams, but I've always just used the browser version, and it worked fine on a Mac and Linux last time I tried it.

You can do that, but if you get the job you’ll likely be having to use it for a lot more stuff. It’s a sign of a culture that wants to bundle stuff up and manage it in the corporate way as opposed to using the tools that people want to use to do their job.

So what product should they have been using instead? Meet, which is a Google bundle? Or the China owned Zoom, or god forbid Webex?

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#486

Post by petre »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #461
farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.

What monopolies have they broken up? The EU has only issued fines to enforce compliance.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#487

Post by j5155 »

Sakos wrote: post #307
RankingMember wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Teams (new)" is absurd. Have we not learned not to name things this way by now? I say this as someone as guilty as anyone of having created an iterative series of files with "Final_1.txt", "Final_2.txt", "Final_1-new.txt" suffixes in times of mental sketch-padding. I would never release a product into the wild with any of those in the title, though.

Tbh, I prefer the Teams (new) and Teams (classic) naming. It's infinitely better than the naming they were doing before, which is they were named the exact same in the menu, but were entirely different versions.

Why can’t it just be Teams v2 and Teams v1?

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#488

Post by xvector »

gehsty wrote: post #382
colonwqbang wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple still charges extra for the Apple music service, right? Spotify costs $12/month, Apple music costs $11. If that's true then it seems market competition is working decently in that area. If you could launch a competing service and charge $10 you might have a chance. What Microsoft did was, they said "Hey we have a monopoly on office software. We should have a monopoly on chat too". And they started giving away T…

Feels a bit like your forgetting Skype for business and lync already existed. I kinda agree with your point but I also feel it’s unfair on Microsoft, they are giving their customers more services for the same price, and the customers are using the services… I’m not sure the customer really loses out if ms are saving them another subscription + integration cost.

There is no justification, this is just more thinly-veiled rent-seeking from the EU.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#489

Post by _f1dq »

ATsch wrote: post #425
hifromwork wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can think of when reading this is the "damn, you live like this?" meme. I can't imagine using OS that does this to you and not being angry all the time (I'm not tribalistic, Linux has its own set of infuriating problems, but at least it feels like I'm in control).

Yes, this. linux sucks in a lot of ways. But it sucks for boring reasons I can deal with, like lack of resources, incompetence or even just ideas I disagree with. You know, just the every day inevitabilites that come with interacting with other human beings, even when they're doing their best. But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waki…

You mean like how Outlook injects an ad into nearly every email I receive encouraging me to use Copilot for sales even though I'm not in sales and think Copilot is, in classic Microsoft form, buggy, bloated, and nearly unusable beta software that they're plaguing on their customers and charging them for the privilege?
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